I just saw the World Series of Rock, Paper, Scissors on ESPN2. I thought it was a joke, or a Christopher Guest movie. Nope. Real. I can’t help but wonder why outdoor sports can’t get a foothold on ESPN if the network is showing spelling bees, bass fishing, European soccer, and arena football. The sports are sexy and entertaining. Sure the spelling bee is cute once a year. What I really don’t understand is why the network doesn’t want to take the risk on, say, freestyle kayaking. The X Games seems to do well for ESPN. I had a short discussion about this with Joel Heath up at the Teva Mountain Games. ESPN has no interest in broadcasting the event.

39 Responses to “Ro Sham Bo”

How could you forget competitive eating?! The fact I even know who Kobayahsi is indicates a strange trend in alternative sports. I think the X-games are as close are we’re going to get with outdoors sports. I’ve actually talked about this with friends who work for ESPN and my best guesses are:

1-Lack of “watchability”– with arena football, fishing, or even spelling, the audience quickly understands what’s supposed to happen. They are quirky yet simple in concept. In many outdoors sports, especially those that are judged (like freestyle kayaking), it’s easy to lose interest because people don’t know what’s going on. Even mountain biking, unless it’s hammerin’ donwhills, is tough to watch because TV has that illusion of making it look very slow.

Now granted, anyone who has had to endure a WNBA game knows that money is as much a part of it as quality (the NBA is paying for the WBNA).

2-The athletes themselves aren’t appealing–and I mean that in a media friendly sense, not to folks like us who actually care about the sports. Outdoors sports are mostly white, middle-upper class people or Europeans–which doesn’t bode well for American audiences. Even the “wild cards” lack something–maybe it’s the “villain” factor we come to expect in pro athletes. Add to that, outside of a handful of X-games athletes and Lane Armstrong, the general public has a tough time rallying behind some guy who needs a day job to get by. It’s weird, I know, but that’s sort of the way of the world.

3-This is might be the most damning factor–many outdoors sports are very expensive. From skiing to kayaking, biking and rock climbing, they aren’t sports you can’t just get up and do if you don’t have a little expendable income. The reason that the “big 3” are so popular is because anyone can at least try them–throw a ball, shoot a basket, tackle a guy. And many of these outdoors sports are hard to access if you don’t live in the right area.

I’m sure there are other factors too, advertisers especially want to see their multi-million dollar athletes featured because when you get down to it, big sports are big business and ESPN is like a long running commercial. Until things change, we’ll have to live with grainy footage on OLN and impressive but crushingly boring rock climbing videos with new age music.